Mr. Niall Conroy:

With regard to the profile of immigrants into Ireland, as Dr. Bergin said they are mainly of working age. Typically about 85% would be of working age between the ages of 15 and 65. Most would be in that employable category and would be contributing positively there. More specifically in recent years, we saw after the pandemic there was a big increase in the high-wage sectors of tech and pharmaceutical and the sort of high-paying sectors whose output seems to have increased a lot in Ireland.

There seems to have been a lot of inward migration filling some of those roles. A lot of the skilled labour to which Dr. Adele Bergin was speaking seems to have flown into those sectors. In some ways, given the shortages in the construction sector, it would have been almost better had it gone into those sectors where it is more required. As we outlined in the report, there could definitely be a role for non-EU labour to fill those roles in the construction sector because there is no large wage deferential like there was in the mid-2000s when we had that big influx of labour from those new EU states who filled positions in the construction sector during the last large housing output we had at that time.